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What I liked about Professional MTS and MSMQ is the authors' ability to smooth all the difficulty of the subject. Reading the book makes using MTS and MSMQ seem simple. Granted, MTS/MSMQ is not that difficult, but the authors still do a good job presenting the topics incrementally, making each the natural follow-up of the previous one.
The book is built around a sample application that requires all the newest distributed and web-related technologies from Microsoft. The first chapter is a high-level overview of web applications and introduces the "Wrox Car Company" -- a sample system that simulates a car showroom with a stand-alone and web-based module. Even though the project sounds simple and lacks much of the complexity of an effective real-world enterprise system, it is nonetheless concrete and reasonable. Many of you may be involved with more complex architectures, but in most cases the additional layer of complexity lies on the server side, between the middleware and the databases. In other words, what changes are the business rules that are obviously a bit more complex in almost all enterprise systems. However, the business rules are isolated in the middleware components and their being more or less articulated doesn't affect the topics discussed in the book -- how and why employ MTS and MSMQ in today's web applications.
With the second chapter, Homer and Sussman start up the project, releasing an initial quite simple version of the server component to be used and enhanced later. They use Visual Basic for the stand-alone module and ASP and Remote Data Services (RDS) for the web-based interface. This chapter also is insighful for web programmers since it demonstrates concrete uses of scriptlets -- the small HTML components supported by Internet Explorer 4.x. Chapter 3 introduces MTS and provides full coverage of all its aspects, from transaction handling to resource managers, from component instances to state persistence.
I was impressed by the way the writing makes its subject seem simple and the way the pages flow smoothly one after the other. It seemed that whenever a question arose in my mind while reading, its answer soon followed, just a few lines later. The text undoubtedly owes its clarity and flow to both the merits of the authors and the vigilance of its editors.
The final part of the chapter introduces the notion of using components with MTS. The authors discuss the major aspects of the MTS programming model as well as the rules to keep in mind when writing MTS-compliant modules, such as calling SetComplete as often as possible. If Chapter 3 shows the theory of employing MTS in distributed systems, Chapter 4 puts all that into practice by enhancing the components written previously and upgrading them to MTS. In this way, it's easy to identify what changes with MTS, and to form an idea of the impact it may have on existing, non-MTS components.
The same pattern (an introductory chapter plus an improvement over existing components and applications) is maintained for discussing Message Queue. Homer and Sussman provide a simple description of queuing and how it affects the development of distributed applications. Also due to an appropriate use of figures, the chapter is fluent and understandable even if you have no specific background in queuing and related topics.
The next step -- and a fundamental element in any distributed system -- is security. Again, you'll find a first chapter with many basic concepts and a second oriented to integrate those principles with the application. The final part of the book is devoted to the pure web where the authors refine the system's front end.
Once you've read Professional MTS and MSMQ with VB and ASP, you'll have a clear understanding of what is needed to exploit MTS and MSMQ. From a technical point of view, you have all you may reasonably need and no primary topic has been left out. In short, it's a good and valuable book.
-- Dino Esposito